There are over one million mobile apps, yet there is demand to build more, and mobile studios struggle to find developers to meet this demand. Founded in 2011, Romanian startup Appscend, an app-builder with offices in New York City and Bucharest, provides companies with a shortcut that helps create native mobile apps by the developers “fluent” in the most common programming language – PHP.

Rather than build their own mobile development team, companies can register for 4 different packages (ranging from ~74 to ~523 euros monthly) to speed up app creation and launch. Features provided by Appscend include push notifications, user analytics, in-app purchases, and ad-integration.

In terms of numbers, the company states that it has over 250 “mobile deployments” in the AppStore, Google Play store, and closed enterprise environments. Further, apps produced by Appscend reach over half a million global end-users. At the present time, Appscend provides apps capable of functioning on iOS 4+ and Android 2.2+.

Appscend is bootstrapped, and cash-positive. Amongst other channels, the company is actively working with distributors, offering them Appscend platform as a white label.

No question, the competition in the app-building space is pretty solid. In addition to Appscend, other notable app-building services include the Russian startup Octopod, and Western Appcelerator, Urban Airship, Flurry, and Parse.(the latter three offer only elements of what Appscend provides). There is even a startup My-apps (from Russia) that enables “schoolgirls” to create their own apps using “drag-and-drop” user interface.

According to Alexandra Dumitru of Appscend, what sets the Romanian startup apart from these companies is its versatility. Whereas Dumitru argues that a service like Appcelerator’s development language is based upon Javascript, Appscend’s code is based upon a simple XML and offers developers their choice of programming language.

Appscend, that we have meant to cover for quite some time now, also offers a number of pre-built industry solutions which would certainly simplify implementation of a mobile strategy by SMEs.Tweet